Local press spotlights author Wasyl Barka (10/20/96)

Local press spotlights author Wasyl Barka

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Wasyl Barka, author of the 1958 book "The Yellow Prince," which detailed life for one family during the 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine, recently addressed close to 100 Ukrainian Americans in Glen Spey, N.Y., reported the Middletown, N.Y., newspaper, the Sunday Record.

The 88-year-old Mr. Barka, a resident of Glen Spey, discussed his writings - 20 books in all. During the famine, he worked as a lecturer, art museum curator and assistant professor of medieval literature in Ukraine.

"The Yellow Prince" was published eight years after Mr. Barka emigrated to the United States and is the basis for the 1990 film "Famine - 33," directed by Oles Yanchuk of Kyiv. The film won awards in Ukraine, and was screened throughout the U.S.

"Only in America can I express, such precious freedom to write and not be killed by [Communist] ideas," Mr. Barka told his audience. Ukrainian organizations, like the Women's League of Ukrainian Voters, are lobbying to have the Ukrainian author nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

During World War II, Mr. Barka said he was forced to serve in the Soviet Army. He escaped the army and was later detained as a prisoner of war in German slave camps. After the war, he lived in a displaced persons' camp in Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1950.

In America, he was offered a job as an editor in the Ukrainian department of Radio Liberty in New York. After two years he developed a heart condition, and moved to the Ukrainian settlement near the Verkhovyna resort of the Ukrainian Fraternal Association in Glen Spey.